I spoke with Scout Labs earlier this week and got access to their platform for an extended period of time so I might evaluate it and compare it to other Social Media Monitoring platforms (see More Analytics Platforms I’m looking at right now) – so far, I like what I seeing and the price is right (between 100-200 per month for the full functionality).  I must say that parts of Scout Labs remind me of Sysomos Map, and I like what Sysomos does with keyword and phrase mining.

I’ll list what I noticed in this first testing of Scout Labs in no particular order as I’ll be using it more over the next few months.

I’m using a case study of  the Cuban Restaurant – pretty much the same test I’m running in Viralheat,  I set up a similar profile in Scout Labs.

Here’s what I set up for Scout Labs and the local Cuban Restaurant chain, Havana Central.

Required = AND while Relevant=OR and Excluded = NOT – the interface to enter queries is very simple and seems to cover all you would need to enter a complex search query, yet very simply.   In this case I went with “Havana Central” but NOT “Old Havana”, the same exact query I put into Viral Heat and the same one I’ll put into Sysomos Map now.

The first thing I noticed is my saved searches are ranked by the amount of change (Buzz) that took place over the last two weeks.

I wrote last night (this post is updated) that Scout Labs can look at only one month at a time – but that’s not true – actually – it has a window of up to 6 months (not sure if you can look back further than 6 months as your profiles continue to run or not – maybe Scout Labs can weigh in on that).

Note: there is an assumption with several monitoring platforms – as your monitoring Buzz, what your monitoring is fairly current and offering historical data is not necessary.

I’m happy that Scout Labs provides 6 months of historical data to begin with.

I’ll make my point again – a historical database is really almost a  necessity for some of the work I do.

Volume of Social Media Mentions

Still, comparing Scout Labs to the competition in terms of volume of mentioned brings us some interesting things

Scout Labs

Radian6

Sysomos MAP

Notice how different these 3 platforms are in just picking up data – Scout labs has far less data it picked up over the last month and I’m not sure why,  but I will ask.  One possibility is noise filtering and spam lists – Sysomos is pretty good at filtering out noise – maybe Scout Labs is too, but maybe it’s filters are different

- (I think that all the platforms are different in this respect, Volume and you will not get an identical results in any of them – not unless there is one crawler/data source for all the Social Media Monitoring platforms use as their primary source – and they equally draw upon it – a idea no one has yet proposed that I’m aware of).

IDEA: Having said that, I did propose “plug and play” modules was part of the future of Social Media Monitoring when I spoke in London last November (see slide 20)- and maybe the “plug and play” module is the data itself – let’s have one or two companies supply the data the rest of them use – that would make the comparisons a lot better in my opinion – as well as the collection of data.

The idea of a single data collection process for all vendors has merit, and it fact, is somewhat similar to what ATM machines do now – when it comes to money, people are lot more particular about who has what … but isn’t information now more valuable than money? – esp if its the right information.

We want a clean, accurate data collection process and that’s clearly a problem for all the vendors as they are pooling the data together and storing it as best the can – but it causes interoperability issues  - no one’s data essentially agrees with one another, for the most part – sorta like Quantum Physics - but do we really want that in Analytics?   Do we really want to have 10000 vendors with 10000 versions of reality to pick from – because that’s more or less, what we have now.

Radian6

Sysomos Map

Scout Labs

As usual, the numbers don’t come close to each other – the same thing I found recently when I compared the first set of platforms.

Radian6 Blogs =   15%       60 blog posts

Sysomos Blogs =  13%      40 blog posts

Scout Labs Blogs=64%    30 blog posts

See what I mean – no standards at all – it’s totally up to the vendor and they are making their own rules based on what is easier for them to aggregate.

Also, I notice Scout Labs has a functionality very similar to Sysomos Map in that it captures significant phrases; in addition it also displays the sentiment of the phrase – very nice.

Scout Labs Quotes

Sysomos MAP

The Sysomos quotes  are   chosen using by a different algorithm than the Scout Labs quotes  and I’m not surprised – if you read the rest of this post it’s obvious none of these platforms will agree on anything the majority of the time- but  I like the quotes Scout Labs picked up.

Radian6 does not have this functionality, no point comparing them  on it.

WorkFlow Management

Scout Labs

Scout Labs is roughly comparable with Radian6 in Workflow Management as you can assign a tweet or blog post to someone on the team to answer.

Radian6

Sysomos MAP doesn’t have workflow management, nor does Viralheat,  not point in comparing them to such.  It’s possible that Sysomos Heartbeat does have features that Sysomos Map does not – there may be Workflow management there – but I haven’t explored Heartbeat much yet – so I’ll leave it out of this discussion for the time being.

My next post in this series will measure sentiment analysis Scout Labs vs. Radian6 and Sysomos – plus anything else I can pull in – I’d do the sentiment analysis but for a notice the data takes 24 hours to have sentiment.

A few weeks ago I met with someone from TRAACKR, a fairly new service that provides custom Influencer Lists that are useful for blogger outreach.    Unlike the lists I came up with in Using Twitter to find Influentials and my work with Radian6, Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 and Sysomos, platforms that I have access to, TRAACKR is a service that aggregates a lot of different information and creates a custom list of Influentials based on a series of keywords you provide to TRAACKR.

Note:  Crimson Hexagon uses TRAACKR for Influencer identification.

The service is boutique and not inexpensive, but I found it difficult if not impossible to replicate the list of influentials with any of the tools I have access to – though I think many of the names TRAACKR comes up appear to be individuals I might come up with in a conventional search, on Google, or using a Social Media Monitoring tool, like Radian6 or Sysomos – both which have reports that attempt to identify influencers.

The list above is one that TRAACKR shared with me – it’s part of the top 25 Authorities, according to TRAACKR, that influenced Public Relations …. and guess what … the names seem to be people that I know, all of them – in fact, I know almost everyone on the list.

The Aggregated information for the Influencer List takes a few days for TRAACKR to collect and there is some human intervention that’s needed – about 70% is automated, and 30% comprises of a person double checking the information collected and filling in the blanks, when  neccessary.

I thought the lists could be replicated, and I tried one using Radian6 against a Health Care Influencer List that TRAACKR provided me; after a few hours of looking at the data, I concluded Radian6 was never designed to produce a report like this, and the amount of work needed to produce an influence list as clear as this one would be more expensive and exhausting, than just paying TRAACKR to produce one for you.

However, the real value of TRAACKR is to produce an Influencer List for areas you know nothing about – also it would be nice if TRAACKR could produce a geo-targeted Influence List – but maybe that’s asking for too much.

According to the marketing notes on the TRAACKR website - they do a lot of heavy lifting to come up with the Influencer List. TRAACKR says they  calculates influencers’ score based on proprietary algorithms to help marketers and PR professionals decide who they need to contact and how to reach these influencers.

You can see the list of keywords being used in each list, so you can try replicating the results using other platforms, but honestly, I doubt you could -though, as I said, you can often come up with many of the same names in other ways – but not all of them.

According to TRAACKR – their  Online Authority List is a list of individuals steering online conversations about a specific market or topic. Traackr scans the social web to identify the most influential and most relevant people online and dynamically generates your Authority List.

Here’s some facts about TRAACKR  – my point being – yes, you can get something useful from generating your own influencer lists in whatever platform you choose … but – it’s actually more cost effective to use TRAACKR if your an agency.

Personally, I’d like to test TRAACKR using a subject I do know about, like Web Analytics – test it nationally, and test it locally, in, say, NYC – see what it comes up with – would be very interested in trying that.

I write some of my best posts when I’m tired and about to pass out from a long day of working and writing – since my post on Looking forward to Monitoring Social Media 09 in London – November 17th was re-tweeted several times, and I only covered half the sessions at Monitoring Social Media 09 next month in that post – now that I’m wide awake, after a long nights sleep, here’s the rest of the sessions I did not cover in the first post (read Looking forward to Monitoring Social Media 09 in London – November 17th, first, then finish up reading this post).

In The Truth about Social Media Data – I’m expecting to hear “who” is collecting the data and  partnerships where the data is being resold or “white labeled” ….

The Truth About Social Media Data
Giles Palmer, Founder and Managing Director, Brandwatch
With leading brands increasingly turning to social media for insight, feedback and guidance, social media data is under the spotlight. Questions about it’s origins, accuracy and scope have the potential to undermine the whole monitoring industry. In this session Giles Palmer, who has successfully led more than a hundred organisations through the murky world of social media data, explains where it comes from, who controls it, how it is filtered and categorised, its inherent flaws and limitations, and how to avoid misreading the information you are presented with.

In fact, white labeling of monitoring platforms is happening and has been happening for a while – and it might be there are only a few companies pulling the data in the first place off the web.  I know that Alterian/Techrigy/SM2 is white labeling their platform (though I never saw an example of it) and I know Radian6 white labels CisionPoint (I’ve personally seen this) and some contact management platforms, and CRM platforms, like SalesForce, are using Radian6 as a “gigantic EAR” and wrote about it in a few posts at Webmetricsguru.com where Social Media and Web Analytics are going to be merging more and more (which hearkens back to my session on The Future of Social Media Monitoring panel, earlier in the day).

Here’s the posts addressing the merging of data that I see happening more and more New Developments in Search, Analytics and Social Media plus Radian6’s Web Analytics and Salesforce.com Intergration along the work with Tealium.com, which picks up which of your customers was exposed to the brand message when they land on your site.com.

But, I’m expecting Giles Palmer to come up with something more revealing on who is actually getting rich on this “data” about us - (similar to the rumor that the CIA founded Facebook to collect data on us – rumor)  and how our “identity might be  sold from Social Networks and end up somewhere else or used by someone else” – looking towards finding out something I don’t know, yet, like

” …. you’ll be alarmed at a new article from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) that outlines how third parties are getting access to your personal information. Sites such as CareerBuilder.com are utilizing cookies from up to ten different tracking domains. These sites are using hard-to-delete cookies that remain on your computer system long after you’ve browsed the site.

Yeah, never liked CareerBuilder.com, but then, I used to work for Monster.com – so why would I? … and that’s what I’m hoping he’ll tell us, and what we can do about it.  Yes, I’m looking for conspiracy theories  in this session (after all, doesn’t the title of this session suggest that?) – lets see if Giles comes out and says that. We’ll see.

If Giles Palmer says what I hope he’ll say – and more – it’ll be worth the plane trip, hotel and conference admission price,  in London, even if I wasn’t speaking (but I am speaking).  I’m tired of going to Social Media conferences that just repeat what we already know, give me something new – Giles.  I bet he will.

In the next session, I’m expecting a Case Study – my guess is it’ll be  sufficiently detailed to glimmer at some truths we all need to apply with Social Media Community Building ….

The Power of Listening & Responding: Skype
Robin Grant, Managing Director, We Are Social
Robin will talk about how We Are Social helped Skype to set-up and run their own real-time social media listening and responding programme. He will provide insights into the tools and methodologies used and explain the impact social media monitoring had on Skype’s business. He will also describe how it helped them to manage a major crisis.

The key to this session is finding out what they did, specifically, and how it actually turned things around – I’m not expecting to find out anything that revolutionary here, but if I did, I’d be glad – if I found something about community building, reacting quickly, etc, that is generally not well known or understood, but could be ground breaking - I’ll just go on the record as saying – I’m not expecting that level of insight from this session, but if it happens, it’ll  an added bonus for being at #msm09 .

In Surviving in iPhone Territory - I hope Chris Thomas gets into the nitty gritty of what platforms he used (I’m thinking Crimson Hexagon – sorta suggested by the title – but maybe I’m wrong) and how hard it was to come up with the insights – how many hours did it take,  how many people worked on it – what kind of problems they came across when pulling the data – and what they learned about the HTC and how to launch it against the iPhone that they’d not know about unless they ran this study (in other words, Social Media ROI came out of it).

Surviving in iPhone Territory: A Competitive Analysis of the Launch of the HTC G1
Chris Thomas, Head of Research, The Conversation Group (TCG)
Chris Thomas presents the findings of a TCG research project covering the launch of the HTC G1 – the first smartphone to use the Google Android operating system. The project showcases the contribution of social media research to competitive intelligence, brand positioning and strategic communications. Covering a three month period around launch, and including almost 100,000 unique items of discussion content. The presentation offers lessons for the effective blending of quantitative and qualitative analysis methods, and evaluation of the relative contributions of a range of free and licensed monitoring and analysis tools.

So, Chris Thomas will probably be talking about the undertaking … the kind of stuff, blending of quantitative (web analytics data, for example) with the qualitative (questionnaire, sentiment data, tone, etc).   As you know, merging both sets of data is challenging – and I wrote a post about it a few weeks ago in A Social Media Scorecard based on Digital Footprint Index and a companion post On Measuring Social Media … thoughts and a Scorecard.

So far, Crimson Hexagon seems to have gone the farthest, of all the entrants in this Social Media Monitoring arena, with the potential implications and applications of merging qualitative with quantitative data, but they have yet to carry it out nearly as far as they could, or should, in my opinion.  It would be nice is someone from Crimson Hexagon was in the audience – or even, on a panel, but I don’t think they’re going be there – they should be.

Developing the idea of merging – what if Crimson Hexagon‘s analysis of Obama’s HealthCare Speech last month to Congress, using Twitter accounts only,  captured not only the opinions about how people felt (qualitative data on sentiment and opinions- see below)

… but what if Crimson Hexagon also collected the Twitter accounts of each opinion along with the opinion mapping?  I know they have the data, they have a 75% to 80% accuracy, at this time, of mapping snippets to the actual opinion categories, and a 3% error rate in drawing out the percentages of each category – why couldn’t they take a stab at matching it up – or … we’d find out the match is pretty noisy …. maybe we’d contact half the people we could identify who said Obama’s speech was great and find out they don’t agree – or maybe we’d find out to what degree they did agree.  Maybe we’d approach the people who said Obama lied, see if that categorization is accurate.    We’d go to the next level or two with this data – because that’s what is logical to do.

Now, I’m familiar with STA Travel - I used to have a client who I did web analytics for that did Irish, Scottish and English vacations – STA is one of the biggest travel firms Europe, but getting travel agencies to use Social Media has been …. well, as fruitful as getting Architects to use it …. travel agencies have been, mildly stating it, un imaginative and not willing to take risk, at all, which is what Social Media, today, requires.

Getting Started with Social Media: STA Travel case study
Celia Pronto, Marketing Director, STA Travel
Most brands know they should get involved in social media, but where should you start? Hear from STA Travel how they moved from traditional marketing to placing social media at the heart of their business, including: Getting internal buy-in, How they developed their strategy, What measures they use to define success.

That’s why this session should be so interesting – think about it – there’s so many opportunities to get user generated content from people who take trips using travel packages – of using YouTube and other video data to augment views of a particular hotel, travel attraction, even a particular travel package that is still running – along with the TravelAdvisor reviews of hotels and restaurants that we’re already able to use for the last couple of years.

IN booking this trip to London next month, I used Expedia and got a good deal on a 4 star hotel and RT flight – because I read those reviews and looked at the pictures, and looked, and looked … in fact, I visited Expedia on at least 5 occasions to do research before I booked.   What do you think I got in email box a few days ago – contact with a personal team that will answer all my questions about London and a custom mini guide to London, sent to me as PDF – I didn’t get that two years ago when I was last in Paris for LeWeb07 and I booked my flight and hotel with Expedia.  Here’s Dave Sifry explaining it, himself (hint: maybe Dave Sifry ought to come to #msm09 and explain his custom travel guides in person)

Dave Sifry has been doing just that – custom Travel Guides – and testing it out at LeWeb 07, which I attended – though I didn’t come in contact with Dave Sifry there (but Scoble and Sifry had dinner – I wasn’t invited – ha, ha – and that was half the reason I went – to hang out – and go the Louvre, of course).  Maybe Dave sold his technology to Expedia – or maybe what he does is a much more customized version of what Expedia is now trying to do.

Maybe it’s not just for the publishing industry – but for the Travel Industry …Duh!

” … This could be a game changer for book publishing. A new company called Offbeat Guides produces personalized travel books based on your itinerary and travel details. It was founded by Dave Sifry, a serial entrepreneur (and friend) from San Francisco who previously led Technorati and LinuxCare. Dave has participated in our We Media conferences for many years. He’s steeped in knowledge and awareness of how the web is changing behavior and creating new opportunities to inform the planet. Here’s Dave’s blog post on the new business, which just opened for public beta, and more about personalized publishing from the company blog here.

I may add, the Travel data is pulled of the Web, in real time, and customized to you (maybe I’ll get one, just to compare with what Expedia gave me).  Ideally, Dave ought to just supply it to Expedia, STA, etc, for a fee – but that’s a creative use of Social Media – since some of this information might come from user reviews and insights – and I can see where it could be made even better by adding personality type matching with YourUniverse or something similar – I think YourUniverse – http://www.youniverse.com/ had a fascinating – I took a bunch of tests last year but then lost touch with it – but coupled with Sifry’s guide – it could be a very, very, powerful combination.

In fact, using http://www.youniverse.com/ with Travel Agencies Social Media could be a “Killer Application” if done well.  Just another one of my insights –  fortunately, YourUNIVERSE has done the bulk of the work - so messing this one up really will be in how the data is matched up with your itinerary – I suggest a partnership with them – they have the best network for personality testing with images – maybe the only one – best to build on it.

Travel agencies have clearly been late to the game, yet Travel Agencies, have the most to gain, in many ways, from Social Media – due to the wealth of content and the willingness to share it -  so I’ll be looking at what Celia Pronto says about the Social Media program STA put in place.  I’m expecting a very good case study here on the value of Social Media for STA, in terms of bookings, customer satisfaction, loyalty – Net Promoter Score, even – this is what I am hoping to hear.  It also would be nice to hear about how STA “enabled” customers to share their data with each other.

In Social Networking Data – I’m expecting Paul to talk about, and begin to summarize what has been discussed earlier in the day and pick up on the Crimson Hexagon example I gave above.

Social Networking Data – The Vital Ingredient for 360 Customer Understanding
Paul Alexander, CEO, Beyond Analysis
Social networks have the potential to provide companies with instant, reliable and valuable feedback – to help them reduce their reliance on expensive market research. But how useful is this new data source? Can “buzz” ever match the quality of traditionally researched data? And how far can casual online interactions be used to map transactional or behavioral shifts? In this session Paul Alexander demonstrates how several leading brands are approaching these questions and found answers to them.

The question becomes, how useful is this data if Sentiment Analysis is only 60% accurate and is often not even related to the Topic our using the Social Media Monitoring Platform to discover?   Since the data is so “unstructured” and “noisy” without significant work to clean the data and structure it – might the results be more of a detractor than not?

I think we’ve been there before, and I doubt this session will actually tell us something that new, but it would be good to hear about what measures are used for “Success” and get something actionable (i repeat, actionable) from this session about how we can sell social media to resistant stakeholders and clients that are still afraid to dip their toes into the pond.

In what appears to be the last session (unless the listings are not chronological) we get a discussion of free vs. paid tools

The Price of Knowledge: Free vs. Paid Monitoring Tools
Brad Little, Director, Industry Solutions Online, Nielsen
When choosing a social media monitoring tool, there are lots of questions to consider: why are there so many approaches and services? How are they different? What justifies the price variances? Can’t we get this for free? What is being measured? What resources should we invest? In this session Brad examines the differences between social media monitoring tools, how they work and what to consider when choosing a provider. He will aim to get beyond the sales hype and look under the bonnet to help you select the right solution for your company.

Personally, I would prefer to see this session and the Future of Social Media Monitoring (which I’m speaking on) switched in sequence.  Here’s why.

First, the issue of weather to use Google Alerts, HowSociable, BackType, TweetDeck, Freeninum version of Alterian/Techrigy/SM2, etc … vs. Cision, Radian6, Crimson Hexagon, Collective Intellect, etc, etc …. is one that every person faces in this field – it comes up over and over – and is best dealt with at the beginning of the day – where we can uncover pros and cons which we can then take to us to the following sessions.

Furthermore – the discussion of “free” vs. “paid” tools mirrors the same arguments going on in the Web Analytics arena - with Google Analytics, with it’s free, but powerful platform, pushing other vendors out of business since buying Urchin, or pushing the like Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends, into directions they’d not ordinarily want go in (such as the Omniture acquisition by Adobe last month and the matching up of Radian6 data with WebTrends – plus the SalesForce.com connection with listening platforms).

This week, at Emetrics Summit, Google is going to announce something new with Google Analytics - what if it was the acquisition of one of the Listening Platforms (like Radian6, for example) and it’s merging with Google Analytics data – which would be logical – would that not be a game changer?

I don’t know if that’s what Google is going to announce this time – but who has the most data in the world in one place?  Google. Who has the most to benefit from adding Listening Platforms into Analytics and Advertising … Google.

I predict, something like this will happen in the next year or two – and it will change the game – in a big way.  I can’t tell you it will happen next week – or next year – but it will happen.  Prepare for it.  Pro, it will help everyone but will hurt some of the big players.  That’s all I can say now – consider it an Intuitive, Prophetic Flash – one that seems logical, given where its all going.

Second, The Future of Social Media Monitoring – should be the last session of the day, because in many ways it’s forward facing and may be impacted by what was said in some of the other sessions – such as “The Truth about Social Media Data” (where are future is going to be data about us being “sold off” or not?) or the impact of new developments in listening technologies like Crimson Hexagon have in Public Relations (after all, several PR firms have been building on Social Media, of late, building Social Media into their campaign pitches – and the Monitoring and Measurement of Social Media, and I should know – because I’m personally involved with that at this moment).

I believe Monitoring Social Media 09 next month, in London, on November 17th, ought to be widely covered – and if your able to make it -  (anyone who wants to come to #MSM09 can get a 10% discount by using code MSM0910).

Hope to see any of my readers who are at the #MSM09 or a Tweet-up in London, that week – details will be following in a few weeks.